Monthly Archives: August 2016

Soft Leaves are part of the Dead and the Living Photography I often do. I try to feature my own artistic view of the subtle colours and structures of leaves, plants and vegetation, insects and wildlife that surround me. Sometimes I like the beauty and art in their decaying form.

I’m told they are Spiraea crenata. They are tiny. Under the lens, they look like paper flowers. But, they sure are real. These beautiful white blooms look almost like bleached paper. There are several scattered bunches on the bush at our door. Hopefully by spring, more of these miniature bouquets will cover the whole bush.

A cluster of dark brown to black pelleted fungi invaded one of my plant pots. I had never seen anything like it. They were tiny, but the use of micro lens helped produce these pictures. When each ‘lid’ – size of a tack pin head came off, the mushroom’s inside was full of black pellets.

Like this:

Jakob Werner, a 22-year-old animator and visual design student in Germany, decided to interpret the idea of machine learning a bit more literally “in order to create a sarcastic view at our society and into the future.”

Jacob’s result is a wooden automaton that appears to “read” by holding a book, moving its eyes as if scanning the words, and then flipping the page. “The secret behind machine learning,” he wrote in the video’s description. “This is how machines collect data.”

Motherboard (Editor Adrianne Jeffries) describes it as “so cute”, but “silly little robot”. It thinks it can read.” I agree and I do like Jakob Werner’s idea.

Like this:

Some of you may remember this bromeliad (as pictured below) I posted on this blog on Christmas Day, 2015 and called it The Christmas Star. Well guess what? The star of Christmas 2015 is still alive and even as I write. Pictured above in August, 2016 the gorgeous pineapple family flower has started to fade and slowly die but only in the last week. It is the longest surviving flowers I have had in my garden.

I really like Damien Rice’s music and took some time to read about him and found this quote Alexis Petridis wrote about Damien Rice in The Guardian that I thought summed up Damien’s personality.

Petridis wrote that Damien is polite enough, but it’s hard to miss his discomfort. His answers come punctuated by pauses so vast you could drive a truck through them: after a while, you just get used to sitting in silence while he searches for the right words. When he finds them, they’re frequently metaphors so convoluted they sound more like riddles. “I took a break, and I went off to do something,” he says of the period after 9. “People say, ‘What did you do?’ Erm, let’s say” – a mammoth pause – “let’s say I was a lover of the sea. And I …” – another pause – “I was a sea swimmer, that’s what I was doing. I went off to do a free-diving course, I learned how to scuba dive, I also learned sailing, I also learned surfing.” Read more here.